FOURTEEN months away, the 2004 presidential election continues to march toward Americans like an approaching leviathan on the horizon. The Democratic Party is reeling from staggering defeats in the 2002 midterm election in the House, Senate and governor mansions around the nation. They will field a candidate against one of the most popular presidents of the modern era, who has a fundraising machine that has the potential to smash all previous records in campaign finance. Things sure didn't look good for the party of Jefferson, Jackson and FDR. However, this week, a humbled President George W. Bush stood before a body of men and women and gave a speech followed by only polite applause. Bush's address to the United Nations personifies a subtle shift in the current administration and should offer Democratic presidential candidates increased hope for the 2004 election.
On Wednesday of this week, President Bush addressed the United Nations on the situation in Iraq. His speech followed similar pontifications by French President Jacques Chirac and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. The later two statesmen unabashedly criticized the American foreign policy toward Iraq, specifically the doctrine of preemption. The United States' unilateral toppling of the sovereign state of Iraq creates a dangerous precedent which cannot be reconciled with existing values of international law. Domestically, overwhelming popularity for U.S. military intervention in Iraq assuaged this ideological assault from former American allies, but no longer.
While continued difficulties in subduing guerrilla attacks are amplified by rising American and international casualties, a recent CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll shows a dramatic drop in American forbearance of the war. That poll found that 50 percent of the public said the war in Iraq was worthwhile, while 48 percent said it was not. In August, the poll found 63 percent of Americans backing the war. The poll also found that Bush's overall approval rating was the lowest since he became president, falling to 50 percent. In August, the poll found that 59 percent of American's approved of his job performance, and in April the figure was 71 percent.
One may hypothesize from these statistics that the voting public now finds rising reconstruction costs and prolonged troop deployment difficult to palate. President Bush continues to rebuff attempts by the United Nations to conduct the reconstruction effort, yet persists in imploring the world community to defray the costs currently borne by the United States and her allies. Clearly, the honeymoon of triumph in victory has faded into the difficult reality facing the United States: Iraq will now be rebuilt by the subsidy of the American taxpayer.
This wake-up call comes at a particularly bad time. Though President Bush has successfully pushed through three tax cuts while at the economy's helm, the economic wellbeing of the nation has only deteriorated since he took office. Nearly three million Americans have become jobless during the Bush administration, yet the aforementioned tax cuts have done little to stimulate the economy in the short run. It would appear that what once began as a domestically-focused presidency has transformed into an administration focused primarily on issues of security and international affairs. Without a resume of victories at home, Republicans are now vulnerable to a Democratic attack on platforms of domestic importance.
In an effort to maintain control in the administration's one policy stronghold, Bush declined to relinquish oversight of the Iraq rebuilding process to the international community. By retaining the controlling strings of the operation, Bush no doubt hopes to demonstrate a turnaround in Iraq to the voters in 2004. This politicization has a strong potential to backfire. As casualties continue to mount and the din of international criticism grows, the American public will easily know where to assign the blame. With this in mind, Bush took a gamble when he addressed the United Nations. He is betting that his foreign policy team can clean up the situation in time for the election.
The Democratic Party has a great deal with which to work if they desire to offer Americans a choice in November of 2004. Many pundits fault the party's shift to the right in 2002 when it attempted to chip away at the Republican hold over moderates and independent voters. Considering Bush's failing economic policy and a swiftly declining situation in Iraq, the Democratic Party now has the ammunition it lacked in 2002 to make a potent policy offensive against the GOP. It remains up to the Democratic leadership to see that this offensive materializes in an effective way.
(Preston Lloyd's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at plloyd@cavalierdaily.com.)
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